Think of voice recognition, and you probably think of Siri. Now, though, the company behind Apple's tech, Nuance, is planning a cloud-based, cross-platform system which could make the tech properly useful.

Codenamed Project Wintermute, the aim is to develop a platform-agnostic system which lives online. Crucially, that means the system could tie together data from multiple devices to make the user experience far better than Apple can currently offer. The Next Web tried out a prototype of the new system:

After asking the phone to display the score of the Notre Dame game (and getting a response quickly, displayed visually much in the way that Siri does), we turned to a Dragon TV-enabled television.

"Put the game on," the TV was asked. Note that there was no mention of which game, any team names or schedules at all. The TV instantly began playing the Notre Dame game, unprompted.

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It's that kind of synced trick that could take voice recognition from smartphone novelty to pervasive technology. If any company is in a place to make that kind of dream a reality, it's Nuance—but technical savvy alone might not be enough. It's going to need to convince manufacturers to embrace the idea, too, and it remains to be is that's possible. [The Next Web]